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Comment by joe42 | Hacker News Reader

The author gives four reasons for why people check in. He didn't mention the reason I would like to use a checking-in service (I'm not sure if there is a popular one like this yet). I'd like to check in at a bar or a club (I often go alone) and have the service match me with another checked-in person (or people) to hang out with. Instead of using the service to hang out with people I already know, I'd like a service to help me meet new people.

Seems like a check-in service could be a nice way to lower the barrier of introducing oneself to a stranger. It's so easy to talk to strangers online, it would be nice to bring that to the meat world.

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I think the author's point is that this sort of usage is only actually feasible with a very narrow demographic, in one or two places in the country -- maybe New York, Boston and San Francisco. Elsewhere, the chance that there would be even two people in a given bar or club running that app and looking for new friends at the same time is basically zero point zero.

Besides that, in the introductions world, "meeting new friends" is marketing-speak for meeting people to date, or more precisely, to hook up with. And, I can imagine, as the author does, that women would be pretty squeamish about getting involved with a service that announces their presence in a particular bar and invites people to meet them.

In any case, Loopt has this service, or at any rate did at one point -- in one of their iterations, they cordoned it off into its own application (Loopt Mix). I turned it on briefly once, to see what it would do, and to be honest, it was pretty creepy, a lot like the parts of Craigslist that have been shut down ...

Yes, those would be the two big challenges:

* It needs to be widespread to work well.

* No creepy factor.

Honest advice: learn to meet people organically. It's really not that hard (granted, you've probably heard all this before and think that for YOU it is that hard).

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